ON TARGET: The mad hatter guide to Mideast categories

I actually pity poor old Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird as he tries to categorize the ongoing chaos in Iraq. I say “categorize” rather than “understand” because Baird admitted earlier this year that this is how he simplifies complex political equations: by dividing them into distinct groups of white-hatted good guys and black-hatted bad guys.

Over the past few weeks, the group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has run amok in central Iraq, seizing the key cities of Mosul, Tikrit and Tal Afar, while threatening to capture Baghdad itself.

It is widely known that ISIS is closely linked to al-Qaida, and the wanton slaughter of innocents during this offensive would certainly have our boy Baird drawing little black hats on them. Except in this case, Baird would have to crayon over the white hats that he put on these same ISIS fighters when they were battling in Syria against President Bashar Assad.

That had been an easy call back then, as Baird has used a permanent marker to draw a big black top hat on Assad. As a member of a Shiite sect, the Alawites, the embattled Assad had turned to Iran and Hezbollah to help him battle the Syrian rebels who are mostly Sunnis.

Then things got a little murky when it became evident that the hard-core nucleus of the Syrian rebels was in fact Islamic fundamentalists linked to al-Qaida.

Even more confounding was the fact that Syria’s Christian Assyrians, Chaldeans and Armenians were also fighting to support black-hatted Assad because they fear extermination should the white-hatted Sunni extremists achieve victory. Now that ISIS has launched its offensive in Iraq, there are numerous new players in the game who will require Baird’s labelling as either “good” or “evil.”

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was duly elected to his post and can claim to have a genuine democratic mandate. As his security forces are trained and equipped by the U.S. — with some police training even provided by Canada — Maliki should be a shoo-in for a white hat. But, like Assad, Maliki is a Shiite who maintains close relations with Iran.

In the opening skirmishes with ISIS, the Iraqi military has shown no stomach for a fight and most units have simply abandoned their weapons and fled. Without a federal force to protect it from ISIS, Iraq’s Shiite population has called out its militias and Maliki has called in direct military support from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The U.S. is now in a very complicated predicament. President Barack Obama has vowed not to redeploy ground troops to Iraq other than a few hundred advisers, and until now has been reluctant to employ airstrikes against ISIS. Much of the funding for ISIS comes from America’s close friend and ally, Saudi Arabia, and this was quietly applauded by the State Department when those fighters were solely engaged in trying to topple Assad in Syria.

Now that ISIS has plunged Iraq into civil war, the U.S. has no choice but to co-operate with Iran in the effort to keep Baghdad from falling to al-Qaida. The very thought of U.S. and Iranian military advisers working in tandem would be incomprehensible in a black and white world.

Then came the news that Syrian combat aircraft had launched airstrikes against ISIS targets in the Iraqi city of Al-Qa’im. These cross-border attacks against a mutual enemy were heralded by Maliki, who denied any official co-ordination with Assad but welcomed the support. “(Syria) carry out their strikes, and we carry out ours. The final winners are our two countries,” Maliki told the BBC.

Immediately after ISIS captured Mosul on June 10, Canada withdrew the acting charge d’affaires from Baghdad and effectively closed the embassy in Iraq. We have long since cut all diplomatic ties with both Iran and Syria, so Canada’s monitoring of this burgeoning crisis is now done through reading media reports and whatever the U.S. State Department chooses to share with us.

It may seem easy now for Canada to back away from this fray and smugly note that, unlike the Americans who set this in motion with their 2003 invasion of Iraq, we don’t have any skin in this game. That may indeed be true, but then how does one explain Baird’s lead role back in 2011 demanding that “Assad must go” and pledging to support the Syrian rebels.

Those would be the same ISIS-al-Qaida chaps who are now on a bloody rampage in Iraq.